She passes that along. She works on hyperdrives. She asks about their plans for going public with her and/or spaceships.

They are planning to publicly recruit for a test pilot once they have something to be test piloted! Once they have gotten a ship to go somewhere and come back without killing the occupant(s) they will tell the whole story.

Cool.

Hyperdrives! Hyperdrives hyperdrives hyperdrives. Hyyyyyyyypeeerdriiiiiiiives. How about if - no - but what about - okay that looks promising - very promising - and if it combines like this with that... would you look at that, it's a spaceship engine.

It's still not a scout ship, they still don't have all the sensors they need. But they could totally take a jaunt out to the next star over and back with this.

They advertise for a test pilot!!!! They get many applications.

Spring hits. Everyone is very professional about eyeing each other and (in a couple cases) Deskyl.

She only makes faces about it a little bit.

A materials workaround in the artificial gravity generator turns out not to work as well as Deskyl expected, leaving the test pilot in half gravity for most of the trip, but she makes it back none the worse for wear.

The pilot is ecstatic and goes on TV a lot. They can recruit more broadly now and get more eyes on the problems. Would Deskyl like them to filter journalists for her?

Yeah.

She puts herself on social media, too, starting with a video tour of her art warehouse-soon-to-be-gallery.

There is some interest in alien art but mostly people want to talk about spaceships!

By what criteria would she like journalists filtered?

(Of course they want to talk about spaceships, but she doesn't want to just be the spaceships alien. Her social media account continues to be mostly art and poetry and sparring videos.)

She'd like the journalists filtered for efficiency; she wants to see as few of them as she has to to sate everyone's curiosity. Plus a couple extra local ones, to help things go more smoothly when she starts going out with brown hair.

They can do that! They can also find her publications that just want written interviews if that's easier.

That is easier. Doing a few in-person ones still seems best, though, especially for the local ones.

Also, the reds need to be informed that they're getting a planet before they find out about DZ, and there's really no way to hide DZ from the journalists. The social worker replacement website should be a good way to do that; if they'd like to get a video of her talking about it, that might be especially reassuring.

They were totally expecting to just leave DZ out of it but yeah they can do it that way too. They would love lots of reassuring "definitely do not riot" video from Deskyl.

The resulting video is short and to the point: She knows they're people; she's not okay with how they've been treated; they're first in line for getting a planet, and she's not going to help with robotics at all until there's one all set aside for them with reds already on it. They can use the anonymous form to bring up concerns about this, and if they have questions for her in particular, they can ask those too - she might not get back to them very quickly, as she's expecting to be pretty busy for a while, but she should be able to give them an FAQ within a month or so.

The anonymous form asks:

Did she really get the government to agree that they got first planet? That sounds fake.

What supplies are they going to be dropped off with?

Will they be able to contact home at all?

Will it be a long trip?

Are they going to have to put all the reds on the same planet?

She lets the questions pile up while she does interviews, explaining who she is and how she got here and what the galaxy is like, and then she gets in touch with the greens who're working on colonization supplies. How's that going? They must be looking forward to seeing how their inventions work on a real alien planet, huh?

It's really exciting! Does she have an idea of what incidence rate they should expect of microscopic life, macroscopic life, diseases that can cross into a colonizing population, seasonable planets relative to others...

She can answer most of those questions, at least vaguely, and lets them go on for a bit before changing the subject.

They've heard that the reds are getting the first planet, right?

Did one of the Doetarans push that? Test run?

It was her idea, actually; the next thing she's going to be working on is robots, and she wants them to have someplace to go when they're phased out. But it does make a good test run, too, at least if they're supplied properly.

The Doetarans will probably say the same thing. Experimental controls and all. Not like it's a good experiment in most respects since it'll be, well, reds, not caste-balanced clean colonists, but they can probably afford not to add extra confounders.

Yep! So, what does that look like in practice, can she get an estimate for the blues?

Well, that depends a lot on how fast they're sending how many reds and how catastrophically bad they expect reds to be at farming.

Ballpark a couple seasons to a year, year and a half on the outside, for a planet to be found; they still have to develop scout ships. Reds probably won't be much worse than city purples at farming, if that's a useful guideline; they're more resourceful than they get credit for. Do the greens have a recommendation on how many reds should go to establish the colony?

City purples who start farming have farm purples to help and a normal supply chain, plus reds, uh, are not purple.

Sure they're not, but it should work okay as an estimate.